9 Examples Of WWE CEO Vince McMahon's Insane Work Ethic

Aaron Taube, provided by

Published 2:00 pm, Sunday, August 31, 2014

World Wrestling Entertainment majority owner, chairman, and CEO Vince McMahon grew up in an 8-foot-wide trailer in North Carolina, where he did not meet his father, a wrestling promoter, until the age of 12.

From those humble origins, McMahon, who turned 69 earlier this week, rose to become the head of a billion-dollar company. In growing WWE from the regional organization it was when he took over to the global empire it is today, McMahon has relied on an incredible work ethic that is unmatched in the wrestling business.

For more than three decades, he has lived, breathed, and sometimes bled WWE, both in the boardroom and on television, where he plays a fictionalized version of himself.

He doesn't believe in sickness.

Employees feeling under the weather while working at WWE are unlikely to get much sympathy from the company's CEO.

Former WWE creative team members Vince Russo and David Lagana both write that McMahon has been known to tell glassy-eyed employees that "there is no such thing as sick."

"Vince is a workaholic, and if anything gets in the way of his work, it makes him angry," Lagana writes.

It was impossible to beat him into the office in the morning or outlast him at night.

Vince Russo, who worked for McMahon as the then-WWF's head writer during the company's late '90s boom period, recalls that McMahon basically lived at the company's Stamford, Connecticut, office.

If Russo got in at 7 a.m., McMahon's car would already be there, and if he stayed until 10 p.m., McMahon's car would still be there.